Dr. Margaret Singer: An Evalutation of Her Work

   Dr. Margaret Singer is a clinical psychologist, an academician, recipient of various academic prizes, author of many publications, a former member of President Ford's Bio-Medical Panel; she has been called as an expert to give evidence before the Courts -- in short she is a member in good standing of what might be called the American psychology Establishment. In the past her work has centered on so-called brainwashing techniques used by Communists against American prisoners of war in Korea. She is also interested in the new churches and has provided psychological guidance for former members of the so-called "cults" . She considers herself, and is considered by many, as an authority on the new religions and their real or alleged malfeasances.

   In the past, Dr. Singer argues, cults appealed to the marginal groups of their respective societies. During the 1960's, it was the middle class young in America who became the marginal group; hence they turned into willing targets for cult leaders ready to promise nirvanas to the unwary and the alienated. Dr. singer's historical analysis, however, leaves something to be desired. The cults are not new. America throughout its history has always offered a haven for members of unorthodox and bizarre sects. Nineteenthcentury California especially was apt respectively to impress, amuse, or disgust foreign visitors by reason of the strange prophets and seers who preached salvation to the faithful. "There is a strange turning toward the supernatural among this people," wrote Sir Charles

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Dilke, an English Radical, in 1868 in a vein that strikingly resembled Dr. Singer's a century later. "The success of spiritualism is amazing. The most sensible men are not exempt from this weakness. It is not the poorly educated, but the strong-minded who succumb to these strange creeds."Dilke's experiences were in no wise exceptional. Quakers, shakers, Mormons, Christian scientists, Jehovah' witnesses, Hare Krishna followers, Freudians, Adlerians, and Jungians have attempted to assuage America's spiritual thirst through the centuries.

   The adherents of such groups were not necessarily the disinherited. On the contrary, historians have adduced a good deal of evidence that adherences to strange creeds and worldly success have often gone in hand, even though membership to such churches might entail considerable financial burdens to the faithful. (The Mormons, for instance, contribute about ten percent of their income to the Church; yet the Mormons enjoy a highly respected socio-economic status.) America's commitment to religious variety proved a source of satisfaction to many early immigrants. This country's readiness to indulge in religious experimentation may in fact have formed, and continues to form, one of the traditional sources of America's strength.

   Dr. Singer's historical perspective, however, seems too circumscribed to consider such issuesto the full. Her definition of "cults" accordingly leaves much to be desired. Many of the characteristics that she attributes to cults -- for instance leadership bya strong Messianic personality or rule through an authoritarian power structure -- have widely been shared in the past by "legitimate" churches. were men like John wesley or the Baal shem alive today, they would hardly escape characteristics as "cult leaders" by their opponents. Dr. Singer's views notwithstanding, "cults" are not necessarily more authoritarian than ' legitimate" churches . Neither L. Ron Hubbard nor the Rev. Moon, for example, claim infallibility in faith or morals, as does the Pope. Neither the Church of Scientology nor the Unification Church holds to the doctrine

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of nulla salus extra ecclesiam, "no salvation outside the Church," a doctrine maintained by Rome over many centuries. No "cult" church imposes on its adherents restrictions as severe as the discipline accepted by Trappist monks.

   "Cults" moreover do not form a single category as Dr. Singer asserts. The "cults" contain a broad spectrum of theological opinion. They differ greatly among themselves in political leanings, ecclesiastical organization, ritual, leadership, and social teachings The Children of God, to give one example, adhere to a doctrine which some would regard as total depravity. The Church of scientology, on the other hand, upholds a kind of Pelagian belief in the innate goodness of man. The People's Temple looked to the creation of a Marxist-Leninist community within the confines of a socialist Third World state, outside the grip of American capitalism. The Unification Church, however, is militantly anti-communist.

   Dr. Singer unfortunately is not well attuned to such differences. Neither is she particularly receptive to the force of religious or patriotic ideals as an autonomous motive force. Her investigations concerning the behavior of American prisoners of war in Korea, for example, attempt to differentiate between the "collaborators" , the "non-collaborators" and the "active resisters" . According to her findings, "the five percent of the non-collaborator sample who resisted actively. . .differed from the remaininggroup in precisely the same direction as the collaborator group and could not be distinguishe from this group on any variable. Her findings are by no means convincing as to whether " brainwashing" , as understood in the popular manner, in fact ever took place.2 But Dr. Singer's work is flawed in an even more fundamental fashion. Dr. Singer never made any real attempt to account for the resisters' response in terms of their religious affiliation, church practices, ethical commitment, personal philosophy, patriotism, loyalty to their particular unit, and such like factors that do not easily lend themselves to quantification. Yet such factors have traditionally played a key role in similar circumstances. (The steadfastness of German nationals who adhered to the Jehovah's Witnesses sect incarcerated by the Nazis at Auschwitz

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impressed even the SS Commandant of that particular death camp. Regular British officers and N.C.0.'s captured in Korea proved immune to Communist , brainwashing" . ) Dr. Singer would have gained greater insight in the prisoners' of war condition had she used such comparative material, or had she drawn on the experiences of men such as Admiral James Stockdale, a sailor-scholar who had himself resisted prolonged torture at the Communists' hand as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

   Despite the inconclusive nature of her findings, Dr. Singer unhesitatingly sees a striking analogy betwween the condition of American prisoners of war " brainwashed" in Korea and "cult" members exposed to "coerci ve persuasion" on the part of cult leaders in this country. This analogy, however, is mistaken. American captives in Korea (and Vietnam) were not only confined behind barbed wire thousands of miles away from home, cut off from contact with home, were exposed also to the steady drone of propaganda and more importantly, to hunger, sleep deprivation, periodic beatings, and the possibility of being " shot while trying to escape. " Such conditions had nothing in common with those familiar to, say, the adherents of the Unification Church or the Hare Krishna sects, free to come and go and free at all times from the fear of injury or death. (Both the Unification Church and the Hare Krishna in fact are marked by a high voluntary turnover of membership of a kind unimaginable in a prison camp.

   Dr. Singer unfortunately cannot emancipate herself from her own secular assumptions. As she sees it, religion must not challenge the compartmentalization of life into separate religious and secular spheres. Total commitment of the kind once demanded of their adherents by leaders such as Jesus and Mohammed would certainly appear to her a deviant form of activity, if practised today. Such commitment apparently is explicable only in terms of artful manipulation by mind-benders whose activities justify the use of coercion for the purpose of restoring the believer to his or her original state of responsibility.

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Dr. Singer accordingly seems all too tolerant of deprogrammers. / In 1979 she published her findings wwith regard to the psychological difficulties experienced by former "cultists" whom she had counseled in discussion groups. According to her own statement, something like 75% of her "patients" had not, in the first place, left their churches through their own volition; the majority had been prized away from their respective "cults" through Court conservatorships and deprogrammers.3 Dr. Singer unfortunately does not fully face the ethical and legal implications of applying duress to believers, or the believer's right -- under the U.S. Constitution -- to the free practices of religion, however outlandish or bizarre.

Dr. Singer's work is vitiated also by an inadequate methodology. In giving evidence before an 0regon Court concerning a former member of the Church of Scientology,4 for example, Dr. Singer relied on an astonishingly small sample to substantiate her generalizations with regard to that church. Her total sample numbered no more than five Scilentologists, four of whom had left the church. (It is difficult to imagine any anthropologist willing to generalize on some exotic community on such a slender basis.) Yet Dr. Singer does not readily hesitate to arrive at quite startling conclusions. According to her evidence, former cultists are widely marked by thier-habit of staring, by increased weight, pallor, poor dental hygiene, stringy, oily hair, and general physical deterioration. No statistical data are provided to substantiate these assertions. Unwittingly, these oddly mirror the findings of seventeenth century witch finders. As Anson V. Shupe and David G Bromley, two modern American scholars point out, th6re are parallels between presentday anti-cult movements and the persecution of witches in 17th century America. Witches, according to their accusers, had been inveiled into mortal sin by the Tempter's diabolical skills. Witches supposedly bore on their bodies identifiable stigmata (or signs) ; theywere "blerie-eyed" , "hunch-backed", "hollow eyed", and afflicted with "fowle odours" -- just like Dr. Singer's captive "cultists" 5 Dr. Singer would have benefited scholarship had she extended

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her investigations into the behavior patterns of persons wwho had chosen to staywith the new religions. How, for instance, does the civic or marital condition of practising "cultists" compare withthat of comparable segments in the population at large? How do "cultists" fare regarding alcoholic or drug addiction, suicide, crime, welfare dependency, divorice? How do, say, " Clears" counselled by the Church of Scientology or members of the Unification Church in good standing come out on the Indiana Multiphasic Personality Inventory? Such published evidence as exists seems to favor the "cultists." At the very least, the evidence hitherto made available by investigators such as Dick Anthony, Charles Norton, Thomas Ungerleider, or David Wellisch does not bear out current stereotypes concerning the cult members' supposed cinfusion and helplessness.6 Statistical data assembled by the Church of Scientology regarding the social habits of its membership seem to substantiate the Church's claim that its members adhere to what are popularly known as the traditional American virtues of hard work, sobriety, and family stability.7 Dr. Singer unfortunately had made no attempt to do similar work designed either to prove or disprove such claims. She prefers to rely on what might charitably be referred to as her intuitive capability.

It is therefore difficult to escape from the conclusions arrived at by Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony with regard to cults and their alleged "brainwashing." As they pu t it, "the validity of brainwashing as a scientific concept is problematic, to say the least...Brainwashing appears to be a mystifying and inherintly subjective metaphor which is now being used as a simplistic explanation for intence sectarian commitment, as well as a way of attacking groups against which charges of tangible physical coercion cannot be substantiated."8

To sum up, the weight of evidence makes non-sense of Dr. Singer's conclusions. It would be pleasant to think therefore that one day she might come to reconsider her views.

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footnotes